We are still searching for mentors!
As you know, STORY_S is an EU project based on active participation of its beneficiaries and on peer to peer mentoring. We follow the aim to contrast (young) Roma discrimination and to foster successful educational or professional paths.
In our previous news we have told about the Italian and Bulgarian situation. But what’s about serching for mentors in Romania and Spain?
The situation here is quite different from the Italian and Bulgarian case.
Indeed, Romanian and Spanish teams have chosen a direct mentors call.
The first one (Asociatia Carusel) by sending it through personal e-mails and the second one by asking its network.
Here below we can read the FAGiC motivations.
FAGiC has proceed to the recruitment of mentors according to its local context. FAGiC has 96 local Roma associations from all over Catalonia and also implements projects in many areas with high level of Roma population. FAGiC, as umbrella organisation, works closely with its associations and local agents.
The local associations were the one to tell us about the mentees and the situation in the area, that’s why FAGiC finally chose the districts of Bon Pastor and La Mina and also the city of Manresa. The people working in the local associations know well the situation in the neighbourhood and also know the families. So, they talked to the youngsters (many of them linked to the local associations) and their families and they wanted to participate but with Roma referents from the neighbourhood as mentors.
So the second step was to ask to those “referents” if they wanted to participate in the project and therefore to present the projects. It is very important to highlight that the mentors have been in many cases selected by the mentees and their families and are youngsters from the neighbourhood and obviously with the capacity to work as mentors. In fact, many of them have already been “mentors” of some youngsters in previous years. It is also important to mention that these mentors know very well the local context, the families and what is most important they know the difficulties of the youngsters because at one time they have themselves dealt with them.
So we matched the mentors and mentees taking according to proximity criteria and in a natural way and taking into account the academic education and professional experience of the mentors and the needs of the mentees.
From that, FAGiC organised a meeting between the mentors and his/her mentees and to understand the role of each person and from that point on they have worked together.
If you want to better know what’s our meaning of mentoring, click here.